Thread by @RonJeffries

Now let's talk about the evil people on Twitter, and whether Twitter should get rid of them. Mind you, I wish that could happen. But it can't. I was chatting with @Vaguery about this yesterday. Mistakes here are mine.
/1

Twitter is made of people. Some of them, according to your standards and mine, are evil. If we agree, then Twitter "should" get rid of them. If not, we have the first problem: identifying people who shouldn't be here, or things that shouldn't be said.
/2

Surely we all know that right now, the folks on the left think the folks on the right are evil, and those on the right think it's those on the left. So that division won't work.

What about things they say? That's not likely to be able to be automated.
/3

If I say "if you won't let your people refactor, **** you", should that get me kicked off? I'd argue, no. If I say "if you're black, **** you", should that get me in trouble? Well, I think so. But suppose we all agreed and such things got folks censored.
/4

Humans adapt. That's what dog whistles are all about: ways of saying things without saying them. So no automated system could do the censoring.

What about actual people?
/5

Here, we have the problem of selecting the people. They have to all think more or less like we do, and to be able to tell the difference between my dog whistle for people who don't refactor and the other guy's for black people. Not going to be easy.
/6

What if we could all vote people off the Twitter island? Well, that's easy to get around, isn't it? Who has the biggest army of Twitter bots. Can we prevent twitter bots? Seems tricky at best.
/7

In a world where people of like minds can find each other and amplify each other and where they can interact, managing the situation so that some of them can't drive a few mad enough to do really bad things, well, that's really difficult.
/8

Now if I ran Twitter, I'd be doing my best to kick off the people who I think deserve it. Would I be kicking off the ones you'd like to see kicked off? Hard to say.

And would removing them really be the best thing to do? It's not at all clear.
/9

This is a very worrying and complex situation. There are no root causes and no root solutions, I believe.

Maybe all we can do is engage in some positive way. Or maybe we should block. Or maybe punch Nazis.
/10

I'm not sure what we should do. I'm not even sure that some small doable solutions wouldn't help: I think maybe they would. But it may take literally millions of small solutions to get us better. Maybe those small solutions are each of us.

I just don't know.
/end

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